The Bishop's Boys (12 page)

“The tract is producing a big stir,” he told Milton. “The Liberals can’t hold still, and every movement they make only draws out some new admission.” Three thousand of the little booklets were mailed that summer, with an additional 1,100 copies ready for distribution at the General Conference. “When we begin to circulate them
free
,” he noted with some relish, “there will be fun.”
²⁶

Wilbur continued to write articles and editorials of his own responding to attacks on his father. There were those, like the Reverend W. J. McGee, who wondered at the presumption of this young man who dared to argue important issues with elder churchmen. Wilbur was more than able to to defend himself—and get in a few licks of his own at the same time.

The tone of feisty self-confidence indicates the extent to which Wilbur had left depression behind. At an age when most young men were breaking their family ties, he had enjoyed his first success and achieved some measure of visibility, not by striking out on his own but by writing in support of his father’s cause.

All of the Wright family crises came to a head during the spring and summer of 1889. Milton had worked feverishly since the general election, traveling from congregation to congregation gathering signatures on petitions he would carry to the General Conference of 1889. It was the one time in his life when work came before family.

Susan was sinking rapidly. Back in August of 1888, just after Milton had left home on his annual West Coast trip, Wilbur wrote: “Mother thinks that while it is not absolutely necessary on account of her health that you should return before your time is up, yet she would feel more comfortable if you were here.”
²⁸
Milton was still in Indiana when he received the letter, about to catch a train for Oregon. It must have been a difficult moment for him. His presence would be a great comfort to Susan, who had spent so many years of her life waiting for him to return home. Still, there was the Lord’s business to be done. He compromised, continuing on his journey, but returning to Dayton several weeks earlier than usual.

The leaders of the United Brethren Church gathered for the General Conference at York, Pennsylvania, on May 9, 1889. Each man knew that the time for parliamentary maneuvering or compromise had passed. The conference opened, as usual, with a joint message from the bishops. The address called attention to the work of the Church Commission over the past four years, and noted that the vote of 1888 establishing a new Constitution and Confession had been legal and binding upon the conference. Five of the six bishops signed the message. Milton was the lone dissenter.

The final vote to accept or reject the work of the commission, and the new Constitution and Creed, came at 4:00
P
.
M
. on Saturday, May 11. The result was overwhelming—III for adoption, 20 against. Still hoping to avoid a catastrophic split, J. W. Hott spoke for moderate Liberals, expressing “our deep regret that any of our brethren should not be able to cheerfully acquiesce in the decision of the great majority of the votes of our people,” and honoring the Radicals for “their faithfulness to their beliefs.”
²⁹

Good wishes were not enough for the diehard remnant of the Radical party. On the morning of Monday, May 13, Bishop Kephart read a proclamation signed by all the bishops except Milton Wright, declaring
that the new Constitution and Confession of Faith were now in effect. Milton and fourteen of the twenty delegates who had voted against the commission were no longer present. They had rented the Park Opera House in York, and now proceeded to conduct business as the “lawful” General Conference under the provisions of the old Constitution.

The Radicals remained in session until May 20, completing arrangements for the organization of what would be known as the Church of the United Brethren in Christ (Old Constitution). Milton, the only bishop to withdraw, was unanimously reelected by the conservative conference on May 16. Horace T. Barnaby, Halleck Floyd, and Henry J. Becker completed the roster of bishops.
³⁰

Bishop Wright was the undisputed head of the Old Constitution church. As one of his colleagues remarked, “if Philip William Otterbein can be truthfully called the founder of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, Milton Wright, with equal truth, can be called the preserver of that Church.” Bishop Milton Wright “stood like a hero,” noted the
Christian Conservator
, now the official organ of the Old Constitution church. “When all the other bishops faltered and fell prostrate before the commission compromise with the world, he stood faithful among the faithless, and deserves great credit from every United Brethren.”
³¹

He returned to Dayton exhausted, on May 21, 1889, to face his most bitter crisis. Susan was near death. The end came early on the morning of July 4. “About 4:00, I found Susan sinking,” he wrote in his diary, “and about five awakened the family. She revived about 7:00 somewhat, but afterwards continued to sink till 12:20 afternoon, when she expired, and thus went out the light of my home.”
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She was buried at four o’clock on the afternoon of July 6 in a “beautiful lot” which Milton had purchased in Woodland Cemetery. Two days later he was back at work, arranging for the publication of the new
Discipline
adopted by his church. There were legal problems to be tackled. He was particularly anxious to begin proceedings to test the ownership of the United Brethren Printing Establishment. On August 12 he boarded a train for Union City, Pennsylvania, bound for his first local conference as the leading bishop of the reorganized church. The struggle would go on—Milton would see to that.

M
ilton Wright faced an uncertain future in the late summer and early fall of 1889. For all his dedication to reforming society, he had never been able to tolerate fundamental change in his own life. Suddenly, church and family, the very cornerstones of his existence, seemed to be crumbling beneath him.

Susan, his wife of thirty years, was gone. The eldest boys, Reuch and Lorin, were grown and living far from home. Will and Orv, at twenty-one and eighteen, might choose to strike out on their own at any time. Even Katharine, the baby of the family, was remarkably self-assured for a fifteen year old. Within a few years, Milton might find himself entirely alone.

The prospect was yet more frightening when seen in the context of the church situation. In cutting the Gordian knot of a twenty-year-old controversy, Milton had severed his ties with the organization to which he had devoted his entire adult life. The knowledge that he was in the right did little to ease the sense of estrangement from those who had been his closest friends and colleagues for forty-two years.

Milton was a genuine conservative, who had no intention of accepting the inevitability of change. He saw no way in which the old institutions could be improved. The best that he could hope was to lead his flock down the path blazed by the church fathers, and to somehow restructure his family to fill the gap left by the death of his wife. Only by shoring up the old foundations could the stability of church and family be restored.

The first step in rebuilding the church was to complete the task of separating the Liberal and Radical branches into two distinct organizations. Initial stocktaking indicated that the minority group was not in such desperate straits as Milton had feared. They had taken 15,000 to 20,000 members with them, perhaps 10 percent of the total church population. This included a disproportionately large number of leaders. The Radicals had expected the older ministers to side with them, but the support of a great many young fire-eaters came as a pleasant surprise.

Even with so many local leaders, reorganization would be daunting. Milton Wright and his colleagues must reconstruct their church from the ground up. At the local level, seceding Radical supporters had to be gathered into new congregations. While several local conferences in Indiana and Ohio had cast their lot with the Radical minority, new districts would have to be organized in the rest of the nation. Finally, the local and regional elements must be linked through an entirely new national support structure. The bishops, in their report to the first General Conference in 1893, gave a bleak assessment: “Our missionary, church-erection, Sabbath-school, publication and educational funds and property were largely in the hands of those who had gone out from us, and these funds were turned against us. All of our great connectional interests required readjustment, and some of them reconstruction.”
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The question of property rights was foremost in their minds. The arguments began with the very name of the church. Obviously, both groups believed they had a right to call themselves the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. Within a few months of the separation, the need to distinguish the two organizations led to the addition of the phrase “Old Constitution” or “New Constitution” in parentheses after the church name. It was one of many arguments that would continue for decades to come. As late as May 1901, the New Constitution bishops were still requesting that their Old Constitution counterparts adopt a new name. Bishop Wright and his colleagues replied that they were not only satisfied with their name, “but it is sacred to us as a symbol of the faith it represents.”
²
They suggested that the New Constitution Brethren might feel free to change
their
name at any time.

The disposition of real property belonging to the old church represented more serious problems. Who was to control the church building and grounds when a congregation was split down the middle? What
was one to do with a Liberal minister presiding over a Radical flock? Could the congregation evict the pastor from the parsonage? Could the minister force his decision as to which branch represented the true faith on an unwilling congregation? The search for solutions to these and other problems was complicated by the bitterness that separated the two factions.

The single most valuable church asset, the great printing establishment in Dayton, was the object of the first of the major lawsuits that would follow over the next five years. Bishop Wright, who served as Old Constitution publishing agent from 1889 to 1893, set the process in motion on July 26, 1889. Accompanied by two colleagues, he presented William J. Shuey, New Constitution publishing agent, with a written demand that the facility be turned over to them. Naturally, Shuey refused.

The New Constitution board of trustees, headed by Daniel L. Rike, immediately petitioned the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas for a hearing. After considerable legal manuevering, including an unsuccessful Radical petition to the U.S. District Court in Cincinnati for a change of venue, the case came to trial on June 17, 1891.

In addition to determining ownership of the printing plant, the decision would indicate the probable disposition of millions of dollars worth of real estate that would eventually come before the courts. Both sides hired batteries of lawyers and imported distinguished theologians to buttress the fine points of their legal and theological arguments.

Milton and the Radicals contended that those who supported the original Constitution and Confession of Faith represented the true church and had a right to control all property. The Liberals insisted that in amending the Constitution they had operated within established procedures and produced a document with which the majority of the members agreed. After nine days of testimony, the panel of judges issued a unanimous ruling in their favor.

The Old Constitution Brethren were unwilling to allow matters to rest there. The case made its way through the appellate court system, and was finally heard by the Supreme Court of Ohio on June 13, 1895. Once again, the high court handed down a unanimous decision in favor of the Liberals.
³

Milton was reelected bishop at the General Conference of 1893, as he would be at every conference until 1905. In addition, he was named Supervisor of Litigations, and charged with carrying forward the
series of lawsuits over disputed church property. The decision to pursue a great many simultaneous suits was not an easy one; the United Brethren had long believed that good Christians should settle their differences out of court. But the bishops recognized that they had little choice if they were to “inspire faith and restore confidence in our people.” “If we should not maintain the trust confided to our care, by the pious living and sainted dead,” the council noted at the General Conference of 1893, “we could not expect future benefactions to our church.”
⁴

Between 1893 and 1900, suits involving local property disputes between the two branches of the church reached the supreme courts of seven states: Indiana, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and California. Milton and the Old Constitution Brethren lost every case but one, that brought in Michigan, where legislation favored the control of property by local bodies as opposed to national organizations such as the General Conference. The control of church property in the Dominion of Canada was decided in a single case in which the Radicals won their suit in the lower courts, but lost to a reversed decision handed down by the court of appeal.

The period of litigation was costly for both groups, sapping energy and funds that might have been better used. A. W. Drury reported that the New Constitution Brethren drew out a total of $35,510.06 from the coffers of the printing firm. In addition, local funds were raised to defend individual churches and parsonages. Bishop Musgrave estimated that the Old Constitution branch had raised and spent some $10,000 “in defense of its sacred rights.”
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